In May I packed up all of my belongings in trash bags and threw them into the back of my father’s car. I wasn’t sad when the door to my apartment slammed, which surprised me. Who I was in New York isn’t who I am, at least not now, not anymore. When we got to New Jersey we pulled off into a rest stop so I could get a cup of coffee; it was a bright May morning and the sun was already pressing marks into my shoulders. I smoked a cigarette in the parking lot and watched the cars funnel into the Holland Tunnel. I knew things would be different from then on, but in a good way, in the way I wanted.
In June, two weeks of staying with my parents made me restless. I grew eager and selfish and flew to San Francisco. For the first week at my new job I tried to wear high heels because it seemed like something working women did in a very easy and confident manner. By midday I’d be complaining and ‘massaging my arches.’ I haven’t worn them since.
In July I tried to say “yes” a lot more than I usually do, when co-workers asked if I wanted to get after work drinks, when men asked if they could take me for coffee. There was the boy from Santa Clara and the man who founded his own hacking space; there was the Internet copyright lawyer and the guy from the library; there was the Dutch Apple designer and the physics grad student. I got tired of blowdrying my hair, of faking laughter in small restaurants, of saying “yes.” I preferred having my big bed to myself, performing my routines and rituals that left no room for compromise.
It is colder here than I thought it would be, but much, much sunnier.
The weather had changed by the time I got to New York last weekend. Variations of “too damn hot” had stopped trending on Twitter, no one was standing haughtily with their hands on their hips before the air conditioner, wrists fluttering in front of their reddened cheeks like a makeshift fan. “You came at the right time!” everyone said. “It has been so hot.”
I was scared that going back to New York would strike close to a reality I’ve tried hard to fend off: I miss New York terribly, sometimes. Its conveniences, its inconveniences; its arrogance and its rottenness. I thought going back might trigger something in me. Perhaps the desire to give up everything I’ve built in San Francisco the past few months would swell so strongly I’d finally be willing to admit defeat. It would be so easy to give in, get out, move back. Settle in with the same people, nab an easy 9-5 editorial job, reacquaint myself with delivery.com.
But it didn’t happen that way. I still felt crushed by the buildings, I felt myself growing unnecessarily angry at faceless pedestrians with that high fashion swagger. My nostalgia for New York did not outweigh my distaste for it. Climbing into the cab at dawn on my way to JFK I thought, “So this is relief.”
Last night I went to a ’social media party’ and became acutely aware of the fact that I suffer from Social Anxiety Disorder. I stood in the middle of the Grand Hyatt with my glass of wine and looked around anxiously, trying to find someone to talk to but not really wanting to talk to anyone anyway. I don’t know how to be normal in large groups of strangers. I can never come up with the right thing to say; I can never come up with anything to say. Sometimes I wish that when you met people, the culturally polite thing to do would be to give them a hug. I think we would all feel more relaxed in social situations if conversations began just after we threw our arms around each other.
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A few weeks ago, at a party thrown by a SF newspaper, some of the staffers incorrectly accused my friend and I of working at their rival publication, teasing that they’d “meet us at the flagpole.” (LOL) Bizarre schoolyard metaphors aside, my friend was frazzled. “Why did they say that?” she demanded. “What does that even mean?”
I giggled my way up the stairs, empowered by this smartass display of purposeless rivalry. “Wow! That reminded me of New York!” I exclaimed breathlessly, as I climbed into her car. Why was I so giddy that some local newspaper staffers had been coyly dickish towards me? I don’t know, but I totally was! Is this some form of professional masochism? I was genuinely excited to bear witness to the kind of petty journalism infighting I was trying to escape by leaving New York. You can take the girl out of the blog-o-sphere…
I don’t really want to leave the blog-o-sphere, though. I just want to leave the pettiness. I think that’s what I’m trying to accomplish by living here, but my Google Reader has stayed more or less the same for the past three years.
On my second day in San Francisco, I went to a bakery that specializes in homemade cookies situated just around the corner from my apartment. They have flavors like “oatmeal chocolate chip” and “cookies and cream.” The owner of the bakery smiled and asked me about my day, remarking that he hadn’t seen me around before.
“Is this your first time here?” he asked.
“Yes, I just moved to the neighborhood, actually,” I responded.
“Oh, where from?”
“New York.” I paused. “That’s why I’m not used to people being nice to me for no reason.”
Everywhere I go in San Francisco people are nice to me for no reason other than that it’s polite to say “Good morning” when you pass someone on the sidewalk, to give a passerby an encouraging smile if they look dejected, to strike up friendly conversation in line at the local coffee shop. It’s a cliche that New Yorkers don’t possess this kind of genuine kindness, but in a city with a reputation like New York’s, some wear brusqueness as a badge of honor. There is none of that here, or at least I’ve encountered very little of it. I think it has something to do with the weather, which never tilts into the extreme. A 30-degree temperature range can have quite a calming effect on a person.
The summer I was 15 I drove down the Pacific Coast Highway, past Hearst Castle and Big Sur to Lompoc, so that my cousin could visit the wild horse sanctuary there. The gas in Big Sur cost $3 a gallon, and at the time I remember thinking that was incredibly expensive. Someone once told me that Grace Kelly died when she drove her car off of one of the cliffs that hugged the PCH; I still don’t know if that’s true, but it always seemed like such a glamorous death. I imagined a white scarf wrapped around her neck fluttering out of the convertible’s windows as the car tumbled into the sea.
In Lompoc we settled in a crappy seaside motel that reeked of fish oil. I slept dreamlessly on a fold out couch with a stain in the shape of a starfish. The next day we visited the wild horses. My Aunt worked for In Defense of Animals and was friends with the owner, so we got a private tour. My cousin Amelia was seven at the time, and as we walked out onto the pasture her face lit up with glee. I was terrified of the beasts that surrounded us. They were powerful and majestic, but there was something menacing about the way they could strike out at any time. These were wild horses, not domesticated. “Try not to make any sudden movements,” our guide told us, “We don’t want to startle them, or it could get ugly.” I was frightened and couldn’t wait to leave. The only thing I took away from the trip was that Hillary Duff was the celebrity protector of the horse sanctuary. At the time I really liked Lizzie McGuire, so I thought that was pretty cool.
Last night I dreamed that the earth shook. I also dreamed that a random New York taxi driver threw a huge bag of weed at me, but that part makes far less sense.
I was in an apartment in San Francisco with bright white ornamental doorframes, and when I felt the earth begin to shake I grabbed my sister from the bed she was sleeping in and made us both stand clutching the doorframe until it stopped. Afterwards I was afraid I had imagined the whole thing, so I Googled “San Francisco earthquake” on my Blackberry, and thankfully the US Geological Survey confirmed that I had not hallucinated the event. The earthquake was a magnitude 4.
It’s unsurprising that I doubted the legitimacy of the quake even in my dream, since I have a pretty irrationally intense fear of them. When my ex and I were planning our move out to SF, I made him fill out an “Earthquake Preparedness Worksheet” with me so that we could insulate his apartment from earthquake damage. We also planned to meet at the Southeast entrance of the 24th St. Mission BART station in the event of a natural disaster. I still wonder sometimes if, when the Big One hits, either of us will show up now that we no longer love each other.
Note: I wrote most of this on my Blackberry while walking home from work. Related note: what on earth is wrong with me?
I hate that jewelry companies have co-opted the word “timeless.” There are certain moments in my life that I’d like to call timeless, but I don’t mean “lasting forever” or “a sparkly way to tell her she means the world to you.” I mean that they have achieved exemption from the space-time continuum. These moments have allowed me to become unstuck. They’re not lasting (or fleeting, really) but they completely transcend the mathematical ways in which we measure experiences. They are moments, not minutes, if that makes sense.
I have been lucky enough to escape the bounds of time a handful of instances in my life. The instance I want to tell you about now happened last month. It was March, and though it was blustery in New York, it was springtime on the West Coast. I was driving across the Bay Bridge from San Francisco back to the East Bay, admiring the vast stretches of open space, the flat white roofs of buildings atop hills, the monstrous mechanical oil arms dipping into the sea. It was warm and we had the windows down, and I appreciated the weather in the way only an East Coaster can: back home that week it snowed, but out West my shoulders collected freckles from the sun.
“Colors and the Kids” by Cat Power was blasting from the speakers and that part came on where she belts, “I could stay here, become someone different/ I could stay here, become someone better.” It was then that the word “timeless” struck me, though I suppose I wouldn’t put it in those exact terms until later. There are other words that come to mind: defining, crystallized, revelatory. As Cat Power’s wail climaxed it hit me: I am going to move to San Francisco. I didn’t have a job yet and I didn’t have an apartment yet and every logical neuron in my body was screaming at me to stay in New York, but it was then that I just knew–something broke in me and I knew–that the next time I came back to San Francisco I wouldn’t leave again for a very long time.